


the bones

by spqr



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Redemption, Sharing a Bed, lots of mud
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 23:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13064619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Kylo Ren, for all his sins, is a kriffing superweapon. And with less than four hundred people left in their entire company, Rey can’t afford to turn away a superweapon who’s willing to fight at her back.





	the bones

It’s the feeling of having him at her back. _That’s_ what sticks.

 

That’s what sticks when Poe spits _what the fuck_ and Finn throws a punch and Leia just says _find him a bunk_ and turns away, eyes hard. That’s what makes her sit outside his tent all night, keep constant vigil, instead of leaving him to the wolves, even though she knows he’s still awake inside.

 

Kylo Ren may not have done much to earn the trust of the Rebels. He’s spent years on a quest to single-handedly slash their numbers down to barely one percent, he’s spread his name like a plague of dark, cloying terror to every remote reach of the galaxy. There’s no reason he should be welcomed into their camp, this tiny bedraggled cluster of survivors buried hidden in the mud of the planetwide graveyard that is Boz Pity.

 

But Kylo Ren, for all his sins, is a kriffing _superweapon._ And with less than four hundred people left in their entire company, Rey can’t afford to turn away a _superweapon_ who’s willing to fight at her back.

 

So she spends the night in the pouring rain, glaring at everyone who passes.

 

***

 

The next morning dawns damp and greenish.

 

Rey and Kylo trudge in silence to meet the generals in the command tent, at what passes for sunrise. There’s a flickering, ancient holo map sat lopsided on a folding chair at the center of the tent. Kylo dutifully outlines the First Order’s entire defense system, his voice smooth and low, no hard edges. Rey watches the generals instead of watching him, catalogues their expressions, and by the end of it all, she thinks they’re looking at him rather less like a threat and more like a defector.

 

Apart from his mother, that is. Leia never once looks at her son, staring dead at the information he inputs as it comes up on the holo map. When he stops talking, long, long hours after he started, Leia slips outside into the night without speaking. Kylo’s neck twitches like he wants to glance after her, but he doesn’t.

 

Rey can’t say she blames General Organa in the slightest. She remembers the feeling of Kylo warm and steady and solid in her head just as well as she remembers the feeling of his saber, hot and pressing and unyielding too close to her face. She remembers him helping her up and kicking her down, in equal measure.

 

He’s not welcome in the Resistance, but he’s also not... _unwelcome_ , per se. They all know they’re better off with him than against him, at least.

 

***

 

There’s yelling. Not danger yelling, but _sport_ yelling.

 

Rey changes direction abruptly and heads straight for where a group of Resistance pilots are gathered around two people, rolling in the mud. It’s a fight - Poe heaves himself up out of the mud with barely enough strength to bring his fist back down hard across Kylo’s face.

 

She picks up the pace, but just as she reaches the edge of the gathering, something pushes her back, like a hand on her stomach. She presses against it, but it’s not something she can power through - it’s Kylo, she realizes, nudging her away with the Force.

 

The pilots roar as Poe lands a solid hit to Kylo’s abdomen. Kylo doubles over, even though it must not hurt that bad compared to a lot of the stuff Rey’s seen him endure. Even though he could probably kill Poe in two fluid steps, if he wanted to. But he doesn’t want to, she realizes. The crowd is growing - by nightfall, the entire camp will have heard about Poe getting the best of Kylo Ren.

 

Blunting the edge of a knife, Rey thinks. Taking the charge out of a blaster.

 

***

 

She starts a fire, out by his tent.

 

The main fires of the Resistance camp are too far away to offer any warmth. She’s not used to being cold - even in the dead of night, Jakku was still a furnace. On Boz Pity, the chill is the sort that seeps through your skin into your bones. She feels like she’s dripping wet all the time. It’s not pleasant. She’d like to have a pile of blankets and a warm body to share a cot with, but she’s certainly lived in worse conditions than this. _Much_ worse.

 

She doesn’t hear him as he comes up behind her, but she sees him out of the corner of her eye, a shadow. And, as always, she feels him, a strong, fraught presence in the Force.

 

He hands her a cup of something. “Caf,” he says. “As long as we’re both sitting awake all night.”

 

It doesn’t taste like caf at all. Rey chokes on it a bit, then forces it down, and smiles at him. “It’s...hot,” she offers, by way of thanks. He doesn’t smile, not even a little, but he raises one eyebrow, like he knows she’s kriffing with him and he’s not buying it. That’s something.

 

***

 

Not a lot happens in the Resistance camp on Boz Pity.

 

They’re biding their time, mostly. The Generals are exhausting every avenue they’ve got left to find allies, anyone willing to send men or funding or, ideally, both. This planet isn’t just a graveyard for a giant, dead species - it’s also a ship graveyard, and every morning, Poe and Finn and Rose and every bored, able-bodied soldier rolls out of bed and puts on damp clothes and marches out to scavenge for parts. After she’s reasonably sure no one will murder Kylo in her absence, Rey goes with them.

 

Finn holds her back while everyone else trudges up a steep incline into a downed freighter. His hand on her arm, tight as it is, feels nice after so long of only touching people through the Force. Nevertheless, she yanks herself free. It’s what he expects. “Don’t grab me.”

 

“What are you doing with him?” Finn demands.

 

Rey understands his aversion to Kylo. She understands everyone’s aversion to Kylo - she’s had him in her head when she didn’t want him, she’s fought him, they’ve made each-other bleed. And for all that she wishes her best friend would be on her side - on _their_ side - she understands he never will be.

 

“I’m winning the war,” she says, and shoulders past him into the freighter.

 

***

 

“What is that?” Kylo asks. He sounds like he honestly, truly has _no idea._

 

Rey tilts her head at the little drawing she’s carved out in the mud. She’s not as good with a twig as she is with a lightsaber, but still, she thinks it’s not all that bad. “A faither,” she says. “I think. I’ve never seen one, but Finn was telling me about them.”

 

She’s still looking down at the ground, but she can feel the strange warmth of Kylo’s amusement through the Force. She smiles. “How far off am I? Tell me the truth.”

 

“I - “ Kylo sounds at a loss for words. “Can I just...” He holds out a hand to her, and gestures at her head. She hesitates for a moment, then nods. It’s not like he hasn’t been in there, already.

 

His big fingers aren’t exactly gentle on her face. She figures he probably hasn’t had recourse to be gentle a lot in his life. He probably doesn’t know how. She closes her eyes, and then she sees it - a child’s room, a warn, well-loved plush toy, with oversized ears and long legs. She feels the current of what _he_ felt, what _Ben_ felt, a strange kinship with this odd-looking creature.

 

Then his hand falls away, and they’re back in the cold and the rain. Her drawing is already starting to wash away, but before it does, she dashes the ears and amends them. “Better?”

 

“Much,” Kylo says, quietly.

 

***

 

Boz Pity is like sludge in her veins.

 

She stole a jacket from the quartermaster when they first arrived, but the persnickety old man has since tracked her down and reclaimed it. No apparel rations for jedi, apparently.

 

Without the leather shell to keep out the wind and the drizzle, she thinks her organs are frozen. Her hair hangs wet around her face. She’s long since misplaced all her ties, and since there are no apparel rations for jedi, she’s going to have to ferret bits of thread off the rest of her clothes. Not right now, though. Right now, she’s huddled as close to the fire as she can get, even though it’s not so much a fire anymore as a last, valiant cluster of embers.

 

Something settles warm and heavy over her shoulders. She looks down. It’s Kylo’s cloak. Of course it is. What else would it be; what else does he have left to give her. “Thank kriff,” she says. “I’m freezing.”

 

“I know,” he says. “I can feel you. Quit shivering, would you?”

 

She smiles, and hides it in the warm fabric.

 

***

 

As dawn breaks, she reaches the skull of the giant.

 

She spent the last hour climbing its spine, bare fingers cold and wet, struggling to find purchase on the bone. But it’s worth it, to settle into its eye socket, breathe out, cross her legs, and feel the tingle of the rising sun. It feels almost like training with Luke again. Like she can feel him, all around her.

 

The sun climbs higher in the sky, and she feels another presence in the Force. She cracks her eyes open, crawls to the edge of the beast’s eye socket, and peers down. Kylo’s just a dark spot all the way down there in the mud, frowning stormily up at her. She shouts. He frowns more precisely in her direction.

 

“Hey,” she shouts down, on a whim. “Do you think you could catch me?”

 

He shouts back _no_ , but she feels the _of course_ through the Force, anyway. She backs away from the opening. “Rey,” he shouts up, warningly. She backs up as far as she can get, right into the bone of the skull, and brushes her fingers against it, so he can feel what she’s doing.

 

She thinks of that feeling of having him at her back. And she _runs._

 

Air rushes past for a dizzying second as her footing disappears, and then she’s floating. Far, far below her, Kylo holds a hand out, like he physically caught her. She looks around her - the graveyard stretches for miles. She can see the curvature of the planet. There’s nothing holding her up except _nothing,_ the Force and one regular life-sized man on the ground.

 

She _laughs._

 

***

 

That night, he finds her sitting vigil outside his tent, and says, “No.”

 

He tries to pull her up by the arm. She yanks herself free and says, “Don’t grab me,” dutifully. But when he raises an eyebrow and disappears inside, she follows him. There’s not space to stand up in the tent. There’s barely room for the cot, so she stands hesitantly at the opening of the flap for a moment, while he maneuvers his large frame onto the rickety cot. His eyes meet hers, dark and understanding, and she feels that tug.

 

She eases onto the cot next to him. For a moment, he doesn’t touch her, or she doesn’t realize he’s touching her, they’ve touched so constantly through the Force. But there’s no space for him to avoid it - they end up with their legs tangled together, her face smashed into his shoulder. It’s not anything but kinship, plain and matter-of-fact - they’re stuck with each other, just as much as they’re stuck in this cot. They couldn’t untangle themselves now if they tried.

 

Saber strapped on her thigh and _superweapon_ wrapped around her front, she almost feels safe.

 

***

 

The eleventh night, she wakes with a start.

 

Her head hits the top of the tent. The sharp movement nearly unbalances Kylo from the cot - as it is, the whole thing rocks dangerously under his weight. He’s awake in an instant, as people in their line of work seem to always be, up on his elbows. “Kriff,” Rey says, “sorry.”

 

He never seems to know what to do with his hands in the mornings, but now, they find her hips. She drops her head in her hands, and breathes out. He squeezes. “What was it?”

 

Rey starts to shake her head, and stops. “Can I show you?” she asks.

 

Instead of answering, he takes her hand in his and arranges it on his face. That’s good - she’s never done this before. She hardly knows where to start, but she knows what it feels like, so she concentrates, and she takes the sharp smell of sweat on his skin and the steady pounding of rain on the outside of the tent and _pulls_ him back into her nightmare. She shows him the stone, the rain, the Knights of Ren, the terror she felt.

 

When her hand falls away, he catches it. “That’s never going to happen,” he says. “Not anymore.”

 

Rey nods, but she spends the rest of the night playing cards with Poe and Finn and Jessika Pava around one of the main fires, far away from him.

 

***

 

Mon Mothma assigns Rey a mission to curry favor with the Kel Dors.

 

Apparently, they have a great and enduring respect for the jedi and the Force, and the Generals believe that sending a jedi will convince them to throw their lot in with the Resistance. Rey stops by the _Falcon_ to tell Chewie to get ready to fly the Dorin Run - a tricky ask even for the wookiee - then goes to find Finn and Poe to tell them where she’s off to. They seem to have their own side adventure cooking, half an x-wing already built and Poe prematurely declaring it _sky-ready_ , but they wish her well.

 

Finn gives her a long, tight hug. She buries her face in his shoulder, and tries to feel like she did before. That light, airy feeling, of finally latching onto her first friend. But it’s not there.

 

When she trudges up to the _Falcon_ , mud up to her knees and bag over her shoulder, Kylo’s sitting on the ramp. He stands as she approaches. “You’re not going on your own,” he tells her.

 

“Yeah, I figured,” she says. “Welcome aboard.”

 

***

 

Chewie, surprisingly, is one of the most accepting.

 

Rey doesn’t know how old the wookiee is, but he’s certainly very wise. Rey’s willing to bet the credit in her pocket that Chewie can feel the influence of the dark side of the Force as well as she can. He remembers Kylo killing his best and oldest friend, as well as she remembers Kylo almost killing _hers_. But he also remembers his best friend’s son, the little boy who ran around the _Falcon_ ’s corridors in grippy socks, and he sees the conflict, the remorse. Chewie is, more than anything, glad to have at least one member of his family back.

 

He tells her as much, as they take off from Boz Pity.

 

Rey’s glad Kylo doesn’t speak wookiee - he tends not to be so good with feelings. Voicing them, at least. She steers well clear of Han’s old bunk, and leaves the door open when she settles in for the night, the _Falcon_ rattling quietly through hyperspace. Just as she’s about to drift off into sleep, she sees him come through the door, his form big enough to block all the light from the hall.

 

He shuts the door behind him, careful to keep quiet. She edges closer to the wall, and he toes off his boots and eases in behind her, wordlessly. Rey feels tiny pressed up against his chest, but she doesn’t mind.

 

She puts his hand against her skin, under her shirt. His fingers still, then sink into her.

 

***

 

They reach Dorin in the middle of a First Order invasion.

 

Without any Force sensitives left on the side of the First Order, they can move through the battle undetected. Rey has to still Kylo’s hand on the way to his saber more than once, but they can hardly whip them out without giving themselves away to every stormtrooper in sight. Which is a _lot_ of stormtroopers. They make as direct a line they can back to their ship, but it’s _chaos._

 

A hand closes around Rey’s ankle. She feels a _painful_ tear through the Force, and looks down. A Kel Dor has a death grip on her, holding her fast. He’s bleeding badly.

 

Kylo keeps moving, unaware that she’s stopped, somehow. This Kel Dor’s presence in the Force must be enough to drown out Rey’s own. That, or Kylo’s distracted by not getting shot. Rey crouches by the wounded Kel Dor’s side, her face hidden mostly by her gas mask. The air is thick and orange.

 

The Kel Dor reaches for her face. She bows to meet him, and the moment his shaking, bloody fingers meet her face, she’s yanked down into - _the island, the jedi temple. Only she’s not alone, she can feel him not just across the galaxy but_ here, _in her stone hut, and in the morning when they climb the island to greet the sun they’re not alone, they’re surrounded by little pockets of Force brightness,_ jedi _, plural -_

 

Rey shocks out of the vision. The Kel Dor’s eyes flutter and catch, still open. Lifeless.

 

The battle closes around her like water. Kylo is gone.

 

***

 

She takes a jump she knows she won’t make.

 

Before she can fall, Kylo catches her - just enough to buffer her forward into the open ramp of the _Falcon_. The hydraulics close behind her, she falls onto her hands and knees, and Chewie jumps straight to hyperspace out of Dorin’s atmosphere. She feels Kylo _around_ her before she feels his hands on her, still large enough to envelop her slight shoulders, still rough. “Rey,” he says. “ _Rey.”_

 

She eases off her hands and knees to sit back. He sort of comes with her, and they end up sitting in a mess of legs and knees, his hands still on her. She meets his concerned eyes, and smiles. “Hello there.”

 

He just looks even more concerned, but Rey grabs him by his oversized ears, tugs him forward, and kisses him. His lips are big and clumsy, and she’s never done this before, but it all feels familiar, somehow. Like stepping into that cave on the island. Like this goes on forever in either direction, into the past and the future, Kylo sucking in a breath against her mouth and hauling her forward into her lap, her fingers buried in his hair, his body thick and solid and _real_ underneath her.

 

She drags her lips away from his. “Can I show you something?”

 

***

 

Kylo doesn’t press her down into the bunk.

 

She stays in his lap, knees planted on either side of his hips, lifted up with every roll of his pelvis. They failed to lose most of their clothes - their skin only brushes in a scant few places, mouths and foreheads and the insides of her thighs against his legs and her hands on the back of his neck and his hands under her shirts on her waist and where he’s buried inside her, hard and stretching.

 

She’s never done this, but it doesn’t feel new, either. It feels like sleeping wrapped up in him, like using him as a touchstone in a fight, like taking the darkness inside him and smothering it in light.

 

He thrusts up sharply, and she gasps. Her hand finds the underside of the bunk above them, for leverage, to push back against the unyielding strength of him as he drags out and shoves in again. His mouth skims across her cheek, and she turns to catch his bottom lip in her teeth, and then his whole mouth, and then one of his hands leaves her waist and his thick fingers find that spot between her legs and he _rubs_ savagely, he still hasn’t figured out how to be _soft_ , and she unravels.

 

Another few, stuttering thrusts, and he’s coming. They collapse still entwined, all boneless. He runs his hands over her face, sticky with sweat, like he’s going to show her something, but he doesn’t.

 

There’s still that echo of the island, the _future_ through both of them.

 

***

 

Boz Pity welcomes them back with a firefight.

 

It’s a _literal_ firefight. The First Order scouting party has set the landscape ablaze somehow, mud dried and cracking and the drizzle turned to steam. Rey and Kylo drop straight out of the back of the _Falcon_ into the middle of the fray, take out three stormtroopers each, and end up back to back, sabers thrumming. They make short work of the battle, and Rey feels for the first time like it's not a struggle for her life, like every movement isn't going to be her last. She feels like they're winning. Like they could win.

 

When it’s over, Poe claps Kylo on the shoulder. He doesn’t say anything, but he claps him on the shoulder, and that’s something. Kylo certainly doesn’t smile, but Rey can feel something icy and solid in him start to dissolve a little around the edges.

 

The charred remains of their tents flap in the breeze, and Leia Organa walks up to her son. “Ben,” she says, and Rey only hears because she’s _really_ listening, senses extended. “I hope you’re done finding yourself.”

 

It’s said with a pinch of that dry General Organa humor. Rey has to turn her face away, she’s smiling so hard, and - it’s not something to make light of, the things Kylo has done, but maybe there’s a less painful way to remember it all. “I’m done,” Kylo says. “Really. Done.”

 

***

 

Clearly, they’re not done. There’s a war on, after all.

 

But when people come looking for Rey, they check Kylo’s bunk first. When she’s sent on assignment, they pack double rations. They fall into the routine of a temple wherever they are, the motions and the rotations, meditation and staff drills and slow, slow katas.

 

Every once and a while, he loses his temper and has to let himself get beat up by Finn or Poe. Every once and a while, she has nightmares of Starkiller base and has to find her own sleeping arrangements for a few nights. But their ranks grow slowly and they grow around Kylo like creeping ivy, like sand spilling into an old cargo bay, integrating him into the whole. Rey plays cards with the pilots and goes to bed with the man who nearly killed them all, and it’s okay.

 

For now, there’s no rest. But someday, it will all be over, and there will be an island and a temple and the skeleton of the jedi order re-assembled into a viable blueprint, not just _jedi,_ but _jedi,_ plural.

 

It’s _that_ feeling that sticks. Rey holds on to it, and keeps fighting.


End file.
